Art from Russia

The big haul

Russia's most famous paintings are off to the Guggenheim. Don't miss them

THE scale of the great Russian art collections dazzles even the knowing visitor. You can go to the Hermitage in St Petersburg expecting to see Old Masters and French post-impressionists, but scarcely to see room upon room of them unfolding into the distance, all humbling masterpieces, the legacy of spendthrift tsars and of prodigal pre-revolutionary collectors such as Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, whose pictures were seized by the Bolsheviks. You can go to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, or to the Russian Museum in St Petersburg, expecting to discover Russian painters little known in the West, but even so, it is a shock to find dozens of them crowding in there, masters of landscape and of human drama, proof that Russia's artistic genius was second only to that of France in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

A core sample of Russian art down the centuries has been shipped westward to the Guggenheim Museum in New York, for a new exhibition entitled “Russia!”. The exclamation mark is typographically irritating, but it catches the excitement which this show means to provoke. There is surprise, shock or delight in almost every one of the 250 pieces. Most are Russian paintings, save for 30 or so sculptures and a dozen foreign works from the 17th and 18th centuries. The best have been known to all Russians from childhood as national treasures, and will be sorely missed this winter by visitors to the Hermitage, the Tretyakov and the Kremlin. They include “Our Lady of Yaroslavl” and “The Virgin of Vladimir” among the icons, Ivan Kramskoy's “Unknown Woman” and Vasily Perov's “Dostoevsky” among the portraits, and Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi's “At Night” and Vasily Polenov's “Moscow Courtyard” among the landscapes.

Thomas Krenz, the Guggenheim's director, traces the genesis of the project back to a conversation he had three years ago in Venice with Mikhail Shwydkoi, the Russian culture minister of the day. They agreed that, while the Russian avant-garde was much admired in the West, Russian art of earlier centuries was scarcely known at all. Together they set about planning an exhibition to plug this gap.

The Hermitage, Russia's pre-eminent state museum, was an immediate supporter. It has been sharing collections and organising exhibitions with the Guggenheim for the past five years. Vladimir Potanin, a Russian business tycoon who is chairman of the Hermitage's trustees and also a trustee of the Guggenheim, put up half the $4m needed to stage “Russia!”. The Guggenheim and the Hermitage have a small joint museum in Las Vegas which will house an exhibition of Russian imperial clothing and jewellery as a complement to the New York show.

For most foreign visitors, the main value of “Russia!” will lie in its 19th-century works. Here Russian painters can be caught at the moment when they ceased to imitate their French and Italian contemporaries, as they had done under Catherine the Great, and started to discover their own distinct country of mysterious landscapes, fading light, desperate peasants and brooding great men. In Perov's portrait of Dostoevsky, says Robert Rosenblum, professor of modern European art at New York University and a curator at the Guggenheim, “We see no hint of the sitter's public identity, only of his private genius—the record of a desolate, middle-aged man, totally shrouded in darkness, hands clasped as if to contain for a moment what we intuit as a frightening inner turbulence.” The weight of sadness bears down even on the landscapes of the time, deserted save for a wandering animal or a weather-beaten hovel.

The Russian avant-garde painting of the early 20th century is scarcely less wondrous in its way. But its presence here is less striking, because many of the artists and pieces are already well known abroad, thanks to past exhibitions such as the Guggenheim's “The Great Utopia” in 1992, which explored the revolutionary and early Soviet period. Even so, “Russia!” will broaden the understanding of this avant-garde in the West, by placing it in a Russian historical context. The western eye understands Kasimir Malevich's “Black Square” primarily as a work of minimalism, for example. The Russian eye places it within the tradition of the icon.

A score of socialist-realist paintings, and works from the perestroika and post-communist era by such artists as Ilya Kabakov, Igor Makarevich and Sergei Bugaev, complete the show. The socialist realism veers between affected innocence and criminal hypocrisy; the post-communist work is mostly inconsequential. They are there to remind us that life in Russia goes on, and not always for the better.

“Russia!” is at the Guggenheim Museum in New York from September 16th until January 11th 2006.

“Russia! The Majesty of the Tsars: Treasures from the Kremlin Museum” is at the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas until January 15th 2006